The present invention relates to a glare sensor for detecting forerunning vehicles, oppositely running vehicles and traffic lights and, more particularly, the invention relates to a glare sensor for detecting colors of light beam emitted from front side of vehicles, traffic lights or the like.
Many proposals have been made of the car-carried devices, which automatically changes the intensity and/or direction of light beams so as to give no glare to the drivers of forerunning cars and cars running in the opposite direction. When the oppositely running car is present, the device tilts the light beams of the head lamp to the left. When the forerunning car is present, the light beams are further tilted downward.
To switch the light distribution pattern, the forerunning cars and the oppositely running cars must be discriminatively recognized accurately. In the prior technique, the discriminative recognition of those objects depends on the brightness of incoming light from the objects. However, the technique fails to discriminate light from the car from light of others. Further, it is almost impossible to discriminate the forerunning car from the oppositely running car. Therefore, the light distribution characteristic of the head lamp cannot be properly adjusted. This makes it difficult to put the devices into practice.